Organizations face a difficult challenge in managing the availability of applications and computing resources within an enterprise system. The growth of networks and distributed systems has led to an increasingly complex heterogeneous enterprise environment, encompassing a broad spectrum of hardware, software, and operating systems. Today, systems range from personal computer and technical workstations on users' desktops, to small and mid-sized servers in corporate departments, all the way up to large enterprise servers and mainframes in corporate data centers. Computing resources may be geographically dispersed across a business campus or around the world to support global business operations. The proliferation of local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) allows users to access corporate information assets almost anywhere, any time of day or night. (See, The Architecture of Sun™ Management Center, Sun Microsystems, 2000). (Sun is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, California, U.S.A).
The use of mission-critical applications has increased with the increase in distributed corporate computing. In turn, companies have become more competitive and conduct business more effectively. The mission-critical nature of these applications, however, is intensifying an already difficult system management task. Users are demanding systems and applications that are continuously accessible and available—with expectations for improved levels of service that are constantly on the rise.
In response, resource management applications have been developed to aid in the management of networked systems. The resource management applications are typically interfaced with the physical resources within the network and provide a console client (e.g., a user-interface) from which an administrator may administer the network system (or individual resources within the system).
Resource management applications typically includes a topology service that provides functionality to model, organize, and display the network system. Most topology services are tailored to a specific resource that the resource management application is designed to manage. The topology service defines the various features of the topology service, including how to discover the various resources within the network, how to model the resources, how to represent the resources to the administrator, etc. When the underlying resource is changed, the topology service typically needs to be modified to accommodate the change. In addition, different resource management applications using tailored topology services are typically required for different types of resources. Thus, within an enterprise system, a resource management application used to manage network hardware may be different than the resource management application used to manage software applications running on the network hardware.